Thursday, 6 December 2007

Component-oriented scientific writing

How can the English-language scientific literature be made more accessible to non-native speakers? Journals should allow greater use of referenced direct quotations in ‘component-oriented’ scientific writing

In scientific writing, although clarity and precision of language are vital to effective communication, it seems undeniable that content is more important than form. Potentially valuable knowledge should not be excluded from the scientific literature merely because the researchers lack advanced language skills. Given that global scientific literature is overwhelmingly in the English-language, this presents a problem for non-native speakers. My proposal is that scientists should be permitted to construct papers using a substantial number of direct quotations from the already-published scientific literature. Quotations would need to be explicitly referenced so that the original author and publication should be given full credit for creating such a useful and valid description. At the extreme, this might result in a paper consisting mainly of a ‘mosaic’ of quotations from the already existing scientific literature, which are linked and extended by relatively few sentences comprising new data or ideas. This model bears some conceptual relationship to the recent trend in computing science for component-based or component-oriented software engineering – in which new programs are constructed by reusing programme components, which may be available in libraries. A new functionality is constructed by linking-together many pre-existing chunks of software. I suggest that journal editors should, in their instructions to authors, explicitly allow this ‘component-oriented’ method of constructing scientific articles; and carefully describe how it can be accomplished in such a way that proper referencing is enforced, and full credit is allocated to the authors of the reused linguistic components.

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In scientific writing, although clarity and precision of language are vital to effective communication, it seems undeniable that content is more important than form. Potentially valuable knowledge should not be excluded from the scientific literature merely because the researchers lack advanced language skills.

Given that global scientific literature is overwhelmingly in the English language, this presents a problem for non-native speakers, especially for those whose language differs markedly from English in terms of its basic grammatical structure. This has become a particularly acute problem with the exponential expansion of Chinese science with an annual doubling of publications from this source [1]. Because, although many non-English speaking scientists are able to acquire sufficient competence to understand the English scientific literature; it is much more difficult – sometimes impossible – for them to learn how to write English with sufficient clarity and precision for effective scientific communication.

The traditional practice has been for scientists either to employ a translator – which is expensive and may not be possible – or to rely on line-by-line sub-editing services to be provided by the scientific journals – which is also expensive and is not possible for all journals. Furthermore, detailed sub-editing is very time-consuming if done well, and if done badly may end by significantly distorting the intended expression of ideas. And anyway, unless the submitted paper reaches a certain standard of linguistic comprehensibility, it will be rejected and will never even reach the stage of being sub-edited.

My proposal is that scientists should be permitted to construct papers using a substantial number of direct quotations from the already-published scientific literature – whenever the author judges that these quotations are a precise and clear exposition of what s/he would like to say – if only they had the linguistic competence. Naturally, such quotations would need to be explicitly referenced so that the original author and publication should be given full credit for creating such a useful and valid description.

At the extreme, this might result in a paper consisting mainly of a ‘mosaic’ of quotations from the already existing scientific literature, which are linked and extended by relatively few sentences comprising new data or ideas.

Such a result could not be regarded as an ideal for scientific writing; on the other hand it may be the best attainable result (from the perspectives of clarity and precision) which is possible within the existing constraints of the real world – and that is surely sufficient. The result should, at any rate, be better than insisting that scientists of poor linguistic competence be compelled to re-phrase and re-combine concepts which have already been well-expressed elsewhere in the scientific literature.

This model bears some conceptual relationship to the recent trend in computing science for component-based or component-oriented software engineering – in which new programs are constructed by reusing programme components, which may be available in libraries [2]. A new functionality is constructed by linking-together many pre-existing chunks of software. Implicit is the notion that it makes sense to reuse functional units when they have proved effective in the past – the same could apply to the principle of reusing functional units of English language, which have previously proved effective in expressing standard scientific concepts.

I suggest that journal editors should, in their instructions to authors, explicitly allow this ‘component-oriented’ method of constructing scientific articles; and carefully describe how it can be accomplished in such a way that proper referencing is enforced, and full credit is allocated to the authors of the reused linguistic components.

Acknowledgement

Thanks are due to Peter Andras for the example of component-oriented software engineering.

References[1] Zhou Ping and Loet Leydesdorff, The emergence of China as a leading nation in science, Research Policy 35 (1) (2006), pp. 83–104.